✂️ The skill three foreign secretaries admired

It’s rare to find captivating books in the policy domain. Most you struggle through, glad when you reach the end; the knowledge in them is useful, even if the form is not.

Lord Ricketts’ latest book, Peace Makers, bucks the trend: both insightful and well-written. It tells the stories of women and men in the Foreign Office during the Second World War, and how their work influenced the set of international institutions that emerged out of that war. I enjoyed the colour (from Stalin’s drinking habits and negotiating prowess, to the origin of the name ‘United Nations’), but what interested me more were the lessons on influence, how it is earned and lost, and the innately human nature of decision-making.

In today’s interview, we explore some of the people featured in the book—like Sir Alec Cadogan, who could take a lengthy policy submission and reduce it to the single recommendation a minister needed—and draw on Lord Rickett’s reflections over a career of public service, from what makes a good inquiry submission, to why civil service communications teams are susceptible to jargon.

Tom

Policy Unstuck with Lord Peter Ricketts GCMG GCVO, who has variously been the British Ambassador to France, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, and Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The preciousness of practical solutions

Sir Alec Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1946) is one of my great heroes. I admire his ability to simplify, to cut to the essential.

The wartime Foreign Office, though very hierarchical, was also quite democratic. A policy submission on, say, ‘what are we going to do about Italy?’ would start with the young Italy desk officer, and on its way up the chain, it might attract six or eight different views, comments, proposals… the problem was that, by the time it got to Cadogan it would be, as he would describe it, a complete mess. 

He would take the pile home and, working late into the night, find a way through all the discursive minutes to come up with a lucid, policy-sensitive argument: ‘this is the essential issue and this is what we should do about it’ while taking full account of the limitations that ministers faced.

It’s a precious skill, because you need to master all the complexity and then reduce it down to compelling recommendations on what to do next. The number of people who can do that while keeping all the other balls in the air is limited. That’s why Cadogan was so appreciated by three foreign secretaries as different as Halifax, Eden and Bevin, 

The lesson is that it’s not enough to rehearse the problems and uncertainties and produce three or four options. Ministers need a practical proposal about what to do, even if it’s not the one they preferred. Speaking truth to power is important. 

→ Our ‘What ministers want’ training, run by former civil service deputy director Andy Ormerod-Cloke, next runs in June.

A good  submission makes one or two strong points

We probably had a hundred written submissions to Inquiries held by the Lords European Affairs Committee which I chaired.  The most effective submissions make one or two really strong points and back them up with evidence and data. If you do a long, discursive submission covering the whole waterfront of the committee’s work, rehashing the familiar facts, then you’re not going to get your points into the report. One or two strong ideas, set out clearly and briefly, backed up with the evidence, will cut through.

Persuasion is best done by trusted voices

One of the remarkable women in my book, the Middle East expert Freya Stark, was one of the earliest thinkers about propaganda. She was promoting Britain around the Middle East, and she had this intuition that the message is much more powerful coming from local people than from official British government press releases. So she recruited  thousands of Egyptians, and then Iraqis, who became the relays  of the British message, with the added credibility of being trusted in their own networks. She foreshadowed today’s firms’ use of influencers: other people passing on your message. Our  government could get smarter at that.

Does your communications team live in a bubble?

Often the people writing government press releases are in their bubble. To them it’s absolutely obvious what they mean by the acronyms and technical terms. They are not meeting members of the wider public and trying to explain the issues to them. 

You could do a whole podcast–you probably should–on government jargon*. In the House of Lords, when a minister stands up and says ‘we are moving at pace,’ everybody laughs. It has become such a meaningless cliché! Another example is ministers intoning that ‘it’s the right thing to do’. I’m waiting for the day a politician says ‘it’s the wrong thing to do, but I’m going to do it anyway’. That probably would cut through.

Having said that, the people who are quite good at this are normally the politicians, because they do go around on the doorsteps and talk to people. I suspect they don’t have the time to focus on these press releases, but they do talk the language of ordinary people, whereas civil servants in their bubble do not.

* I built an app instead. Coming soon…

Are we thinking enough about the future?

In World War Two, the politicians were totally focused on victory. It was left to a small group of Foreign Office diplomats to think strategically about the future peace and how to secure a leading role for Britain.  Churchill was very dismissive; his reaction was ‘don’t bother me with all this stuff about the future, let’s win the war first.’ 

The diplomats knew that if you win the war and have no plan for the peace, you can find yourself sliding back into conflict. The lesson is that you need a group of people thinking about what the future holds even while the political leaders are submerged in the immediate crisis. 

To take an immediate issue, NATO is broken. The trust it was built on has gone. The shell is still there, but the lifeblood is draining away from it. We can’t totally depend on the Americans, and therefore we’ve got to start thinking about what we do to either put something in its place or make NATO more European. That is what the Foreign Office would have done during the Second World War.

In these circumstances, it is vital that the middle powers get together in a world fracturing into superpower-dominated zones–the sort of thing Mark Carney was talking about at Davos. We’re going to need different ways of working together among the like-minded countries who want to respect rules and have open markets. We need to be strategically planning for the future.

People are more sensible than politicians fear

I was in Denmark recently, and the Danes said they’d been having an anxious debate in government about whether to open up and refurbish the Second World War air-raid shelters in case the worst happened. They were worried about the public reaction, but in the end they screwed up their courage and announced it. 

The reaction of public opinion was: ‘what took you so long?’ People are sensible. We need to get politicians to lead public opinion in the direction of spending more on defence, not just comfort people in their complacency.

Politicians follow public opinion these days. They should take a leaf out of their wartime predecessors, and occasionally have the guts to lead it.

Peace Makers is available to purchase at Waterstones, Amazon.

As ever, thank you to the 117 of you who have referred this newsletter to a colleague. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.